Winter Scripting Games: Profiles in Perfection
Muhammad Faheem Sarani
As part of the 2008 Winter Scripting Games the Script Center is profiling competitors who recorded a perfect score in the 2007 Scripting Games. Here, in his own words, is a little something about Muhammad Faheem Sarani, who received a perfect score in the VBScript Beginners division.
Check out more Profiles in Perfection from the 2007 Scripting Games.
Muhammad Faheem Sarani
My name is Muhammad Faheem, and I'm from Karachi, Pakistan.
When I was six years old I got the chance to use a computer for the very first time at my school; I have been fascinated with them since then. I was always eager to know how these systems work. Our teachers taught us MS-DOS at that time instead of Windows because Windows was not a mainstream operating system then.
When I first started programming it was in LOGO (which I have now forgotten) under MS-DOS, which I learned from my primary school; I was 7 years old at that time. After a few years I learned GW-BASIC, which was popular at that time, while attending a private institute.
I'm a student and a self-learner: I’ve taught myself several different programming languages to varying degrees.
One day I was browsing Microsoft's Web site where I found a link for webcasts for teaching system administration scripting using VBScript. Those webcasts proved very useful to me and I learned a lot from them, including WMI, ADSI, ADO, and, most of all, how to automate my system using scripting.
I'm not a professional script writer and I don't script a lot, but sometimes scripts are the only way to accomplish a complex task that would require many more steps to solve using GUI based tools.
I really enjoyed the 2007 competition and am looking forward to entering the 2008 Winter Scripting Games. I would like to enter in both the VBScript (which I'm familiar with) and Windows PowerShell (which I have to learn yet) categories.
Scripting Tips
Here are some of my scripting tips:
| • | Use some sort of syntax highlighting editor such as Crimson Editor. It's free and much more capable than Notepad. You can set it up in such a way that you can create and run VBScript scripts inside the editor and be able to see their output immediately; by defining some shortcut key combinations, you can even pass arguments to scripts which use them at runtime. |
| • | Have some reference of VBScript close at your hand. One such reference is VBScript in a Nutshell, Second Edition by Matt Childs, Ron Petrusha, and Paul Lomax published by O'Reilly Media Inc. This is not the book you have to read from beginning to the end in a linear fashion; instead, you can use it to find any statements, built-in functions or keywords that will help you in solving your problem. This is the only reference book you'll ever need for effective and professional script writing in VBScript and this will also come in handy during the competition. |
| • | Take advantage of the Scripting Guys webcasts. Think of them as classroom lectures given by professional teachers in a very friendly manner. But instead of attending a classroom lecture, which happens at a predefined time and costs you money, you can listen to them wherever and whenever you want (not to mention that they won't cost you a single cent). The only thing they will cost you is your time. |
